## Highlights - He prized the open and egalitarian sharing of data but felt no compulsion to take credit for his discoveries. He preferred to avoid competition and controversy, and simply wanted to perform his experiments in peace. (Page 23) - Among the things he learned was that trying to leverage peer pressure in the classroom didn't work with these children, because they were already alienated from their peers. Flattery was equally ineffective, as they were curiously immune to it. What kids like Harro did care passionately about, however, was logic. They had an innate desire-almost a compulsion-to seek out universal laws and objective principles (Page 105) - The problem with labels, he said, is that they seem to correspond to disease entities that live independently of the patient, like types of viruses or bacteria. But in psychiatry, labels describe constellations of behavior that can be related to any number of underlying conditions (Page 145) - Lettick realized that too much emphasis was being placed on teaching autistic children to speak, when what was truly essential was enabling them to communicate. Using sign, students who had previously been unable to learn to read and write were able to do so. "It is fascinating to be able to watch the thought processes as the children think aloud in sign language while they do their work," Lettick wrote. "We frequently see these children talking to themselves during the day, getting the same satisfaction from signing that speaking children get from softly talking to themselves in spoken language (Page 298)